White Beech: The Rainforest Years (34 page)

The lack of awareness about the weed potential of garden escapes even on the part of self-styled experts is bad enough now, but sixty or seventy years ago it was truly shocking. This is ‘Chloris’, garden correspondent for
The Queenslander
, writing in 1931:

Speaking of indigenous plants, in the Mount Coot-tha reserve recently I saw some lovely specimens of Baccharis halimifolia, the Groundsel Bush, and thought how pretty they would be in the garden. I see no reason why they should not cultivate well. The shrub is graceful and decorative and the flower is produced in white masses developing into white feathery seed which is long persistent and very pretty. (30 April)

In fact Groundsel is not native to Australia, but to the southern United States, and it was already well known as a weed. A year earlier a better-informed correspondent of the same newspaper had noted: ‘This native of tropical North America has become a naturalised weed in Queensland, and has increased considerably of late years. It is capable of becoming a considerable pest if not checked.’ (
Q
, 15 May 1930) Groundsel was officially declared a noxious weed a few days after this article appeared, but ‘Chloris’ writing a year later was unaware of the fact.

The condition which made the unbalancing of vegetation communities inevitable was clearing. Clearing opened the land to drying winds and burning frosts, as well as to burgeoning annual weeds that set billions of seeds. As the forest canopy grows up, and the weeds die out, we see the return of the forest groundcovers. These may not be spectacular, but they are precious. They are also the first to be destroyed by the introduction of hard-hoofed animals. Most vulnerable are the mosses. There was a time, in the eighteenth century, when British people were enthusiastic about mosses, when they grew moss gardens and made moss houses, but that time is long gone. Moss is now best known as an enemy of that great British garden fetish, the lawn. At Cave Creek we have a whole panoply of mosses. Most spectacular is our Giant Moss, a species of
Dawsonia
, of which each frond looks like an inch-high palm-tree.
Last year we grew some in the shade house and planted it out on the kind of steep bare bank it likes, and it has grown apace. Mosses will grow on just about everything in a rainforest, including man-made structures.

The forest has its grasses too. There are the three species of Oplismenus, basket or beard grass,
O. aemulus
,
O. imbecillus
and
O. undulatifolius
. The genus name is a version of the Greek word meaning ‘armed’, referring to the spikelets on the awns. The plant is so small and low-growing that its complicated inflorescence appears to the naked eye as a pale fur hovering over the neat patterning of the woven stolons and their short leaves, which are often so undulate as to appear almost corrugated. A closer inspection using a glass reveals a wealth of elaborate detail. All three species are in flower most of the year. The awns are sometimes sticky, so that passing animals help with dispersal of the seed to new sites. The appearance of these rainforest grasses on the forest floor is one of the first signs that order has been restored and the forest has taken charge. Alongside the Oplismenus
grows another dainty grass,
Panicum pygmaeum
, Pygmy or Dwarf Panic. All these are self-limiting, never getting higher than a foot, and usually much smaller, as native ruminants tend to graze on them. They don’t mind being mowed either, and will make something like a lawn, but much prettier, if given a chance. They are accompanied by four kinds of pennywort (
Hydrocotyle
spp.).

Commelina cyanea
, which gallops over our mulchings, rather as the introduced weed
Tradescantia fluminensis
does, is sometimes mistakenly called
C. diffusa
. It looks rather like a delicate Tradescantia, but with a flower of the purest cobalt blue. In deeper shade you are likely to find one or other or both of our Aneilemas, both members of the Commelinaceae. The alternate leaves of all three present similar patterning which in the case of the Aneilemas is enlivened for three months a year by the appearance of sparkling white flowers like tiny three-petalled stars, floating over the dark foliage, which is sometimes tinged with purple. In the suburbs Whiteroot (
Pratia purpurascens
) is despised as a weed of lawns, but in the forest its flat stems make dark mats of purple-tinged leaves spangled with purplish-white flowers. Our Geranium (
Geranium solanderi
) is fluffier and more rampant than most of our groundcovers, and looks a bit weedier, and we’re not sure whether our tiny yellow wood sorrel (
Oxalis chnoodes
) is a weed or not. For years we thought our violet was
Viola banksii
but the fashion now is to include it as one of the forms of
V. hederacea
. Every forest herbivore from the pademelon to the Brush-turkey adores the native violets. It is one of the special satisfactions of the forest to look on as a Red-necked Pademelon teaches her joey to eat violets. Pademelons will overgraze choice plants, so we grow the violets by the square metre, to plant out wherever there is shade and bare soil. One surprise has been the appearance of a crop of terrestrial orchids,
Zeuxine oblonga
, alongside our busiest track.

Our sedges and rushes could all be used in gardening if they were planted in drifts and swards, and our pademelons seem to prefer grazing on them to eating grass. Most promising for the rainforest garden is our Lomandra or mat rush. All over the Gold Coast, wherever you see native planting, you will see
Lomandra hystrix
, named for the European porcupine. Not a golf course, not a public park but is fenced off by vast clumps of
Lomandra hystrix
. All Lomandras have strap-like leaves; the species is usually identified by the patterning of the leaf ends, which are pointed or toothed, sometimes asymmetrically, and by the arrangement of the flower spike. The Cave Creek dark green, rather gracile Lomandra is usually identified as
Lomandra longifolia
, though it has its own patterning on the leaf points and the wrong inflorescence. Contrariwise what was sold to us by a nurseryman as
L. longifolia
is way too big, so it has been back to the drawing board and propagation from our own seed.

The workforce have little patience with me and my groundcovers because so many of them are nuisances in the propagation unit and the shade house. They particularly dislike one of my favourites,
Juncus usitatus
, the Common Rush. When this is young and happy, it is a very beautiful plant indeed, that throws up a waist-high spout of fine, dark, cylindrical green fronds, usually garlanded with flower or seed. Elsewhere in Australia it can be a pest, but in the rainforest it is a true beauty. The rainforest sedge is
Cyperus tetraphyllus
. Like the rush it is quite common, but in the forest it is more elegant than elsewhere. Less common is another sedge, probably the one Robert Brown called
Cyperus enervis
, which has since been renamed
C. gracilis
var.
enervis
. I say probably because the one at CCRRS doesn’t quite correspond to the type, being longer and finer, like pale green hair. It is exceptionally willing; wherever I put it it grows. The forest harbours another exceptional plant, but this one will not grow for me.
Gymnostachys anceps
or Settler’s Flax is usually classed as an aroid,
faute de mieux
. It is a monotypic genus and the one species grows only in Australia. It too was found by Robert Brown, who called it after itself, the ambiguous (
anceps
) plant with the twining (
gymno
-) inflorescence (
stachys
). It forms a spout of flat strap-like leaves anything up to two metres long, that could make wonderful accent plants in a rainforest garden if they could be persuaded to clump up. If anyone could be persuaded to try to grow a rainforest garden, that is.

The workforce has its collective eye on the large-scale restoration, and finds fussing about with tiny things just a bit girly. They think all these small natives will return as the forest builds itself, in their own time. I’m not so sure, because there are so many exotic creeping plants that will compete with them, the worst being
Tradescantia fluminensis
which in a single season can drive out Aneilemas that have been established for years. So you may find me on my knees weeding the rainforest, like Canute trying to hold back the tide, while Golden Whistlers do their best to sing me away.

Bloody Botanists

Every day, as we write labels for the boxes where we sow our freshly gathered seed, we do homage to dead white men, from Johann Georg Gmelin and Sir Hans Sloane, to Joseph Banks, George Bentham, Robert Brown, Alan Cunningham, so on and so forth. In the case of generic names existing before Australia was opened up, there was little choice to be exercised in the matter.
Gmelina
and
Sloanea
were both named by Linnaeus, but many newer names,
Macadamia
,
Hicksbeachia
,
Baloghia
,
Davidsonia
, for example, besides being cacophonous, commemorate otherwise totally forgettable individuals while telling you nothing whatsoever about the plants themselves.

Botanical names old and new are certainly hard on the ear. What is worse, they are also disputed. Under the Linnaean system plants with certain attributes in common, principally those of the plants’ reproductive processes, were grouped as belonging to the same genus and then distinguished within the genus by specific characters, which supplied the species name or ‘specific epithet’. With plant hunters working all over the world there was bound to be some duplication. In September 2010 the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and the Missouri Botanical Garden announced their collaboration in compiling ‘The Plant List’, a single worldwide inventory for all plant species, including ferns and their allies and algae. In the course of drawing up their inventory they had junked 477,601 names as synonyms, listed another 263,925 names as unresolved, and accepted only 298,900 names. Ironically this work has been undertaken at a time when the number of plant taxonomists is declining even faster than the number of species.

Botanists, like other academic scientists, cannot be got to agree. The Plant List itself is disputed, because it deals solely with recorded data, simply combining multiple data sets and assessing the degree of duplication and overlap. The procedure to be followed by naturalists recording new species is first to find, observe and collect a specimen, which in the case of a plant species should include leaves, flowers and fruit if possible. The specimen must then be keyed out using first of all a field guide, and then one of several authoritative indexes of plant names. The first specimen of a new genus will be called the ‘type’ of that genus; as it cannot be a member of a genus unless it is also a species, it will also be the type of the species. Such specimens must then be preserved in a collection or collections where subsequent discoveries and identifications can be compared with them. The objection to the Plant List is that it has been compiled without examination of the specimens to see if they are distinct or not. The result is a list that has to hedge its bets by giving each plant identification a confidence rating. As techniques of genetic identification are being perfected, it is only a matter of time before the Linnaean binomials are supported by barcodes, and then perhaps the disagreements will cease. Until then we workers in the forest have to remember all the names, disputed and accepted.

Botanists haven’t been on earth very long – the word ‘botany’ crept into English rather self-consciously at the end of the seventeenth century – and it seems that they mightn’t be around much longer. These days people who study plants are more likely to call themselves plant geneticists or plant biologists or phytochemists. The individual specialties are among those grouped under the slightly disparaging name ‘life sciences’, an inferior replacement for the older umbrella name ‘natural history’. The life sciences are the girly version of the hard sciences, and their inferior status is reflected in their career structure. A double first in a life science at Oxbridge is good enough to get you a badly paid dead-end job as a laboratory assistant. These days you are more likely to find that people who are interested in vegetation will seek a qualification in ecology or environmental studies or phytobiology. Among the courses they will take as undergraduates there won’t be a single one labelled botany, alone or in combination. Chairs of botany are beginning to disappear from our universities. The schools of botany at Oxford and Cambridge now call themselves departments of plant sciences and divide their discipline into specific areas of research, biochemistry, including cell and molecular biology, plant metabolism, comparative developmental genetics and evolution, ecology and systematics, epidemiology, virology, and so forth. The era of the plant-hunter is well and truly over.

Historically, botany has been the preserve of enthusiasts and amateurs, too many of them keen to make a name for themselves by finding something new and wonderful. As the Enlightenment spread through continental Europe, ladies and gentlemen busied themselves collecting and describing plant specimens that they dried in presses between sheets of thick blotting paper. Some filled sketchbooks with plant portraits in watercolour. As they were likely to be butterfly collectors, birdwatchers and anglers as well, they were more likely to call themselves naturalists than botanists. In Britain the process was accelerated by the enforced retirement of the Jacobite gentry to the country after the Bloodless Revolution of 1688; excluded from court and parliament, they devoted their energies to annotating the countryside. Such people accumulated collections of all kinds of natural curiosities, and fitted out rooms in their country houses with display cabinets to keep them in, as well as recording their ramblings in diaries and notebooks. Humbler countryfolk knew the local vegetation, and gave names to most of the common species of plants they saw growing around them, but there was no consistency in their practice. Things were called roses or daisies or lilies that weren’t roses or daisies or lilies at all. The same species had different names in different districts, and often names of distinct species were interchangeable.